USGIF GotGeoint BlogUSGIF promotes geospatial intelligence tradecraft and a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.

November 19, 2018

We are not on track to constrain global temperature rise to 2°C let alone 1.5°C. Therefore we need some innovative technologies to get us back on track. At the Geography2050: Powering our Future Planet conference at Columbia University in New York, several presentations described innovative, potentially disruptive technologies that could dramatically change how electric power is generated and transmitted.

Wireless power transmission

General Rick Deveraux of Viziv Technologies described a way of transmitting electric power wirelessly using a technology called a Zenneck surface wave that orovides a direct wireless connection from a generator to a load. It supports much higher field strengths than conventional Hertzian waves and follows the Earth's curvature. Viziv is currently working in a global demonstration project that involves building a fiberglass transmission tower and field intensity monitoring stations around the globe. An advantage of this technology is that it could deliver power to people who are currently off grid. Testing of this configuration starts within 30 days and actual power delivery next year.

On demand emissionless power generation

Christofer Mowry of General Fusion, described how nuclear fusion can provide energy dense, low environmental impact, manufacturable, and dispatchable power generation. In other words a fusion installation requires very little land and can be placed near the sources of load avoiding long haul transmission lines. There are no emissions and very little waste. It does not require fuels that are constrained by supply like fission does. It can supply large volumes of power on demand. The amount of investment in fusion has increased dramatically since about 2007.

Cell phones not requiring recharging

Frank Prautzsch of Velocity Technology Partners described what is potentially a disruptive technology that could affect everyone carrying a cell phone. Thermionic energy conversion (TEC) provides a way of generating power from ambient thermal energy using nano technology. Developed by Birmingham Technologies the Nano-Boxx consists of two metal plates composed of different metals that are placed less than 10 nanometers apart with a nanofluid in between. An electric current is generated when electrons from one plate vaporize and collect on the other plate. The device that was shown was the size of a postage stamp. By stacking them the device can scale from milliwatts to megawatts. 8 to 9 of these will power a cell phone, 800-900 a satellite. It can produce power for about eleven years without charging. To date it has been tested by using it to power an LG Nexus cell phone for the past few years. It is cheaper to produce than a lithium ion battery, has 40% more energy density, and has no emissions.

Powering the world for a million years

Kevan Weaver of the Idaho National Laboratory outlined the results of their calculations that advanced reactors would enable depleted uranium stockpiles and known reserves of uranium to supply 80% of the world's electric power demand for about 2000 years with no carbon emissions. If you add the uranium in the oceans there is enough to provide a source of power for a million years. China and India are investing heavily in fission power generation. Micro-reactors and small modular reactors can provide safe power to data centers, remote locations that are off-grid, and locations where fossil and other fuels are expensive. The latest reactors (generation III and III+) are much safer than the first and second generation reactors like those at Fukushima, primarily because they do not require an external source of power to cool them in the case of an emergency shutdown.

November 06, 2018

As a rule of thumb increasing electric power generation is closely coupled with economic expansion. Between 2005 and 2017 the U.S. economy as measured by real GDP expanded by about 20 % from $15 trillion to $18 trillion. New data from the U.S. Energy Information administration (EIA) reveals that over this same period, emissions from power generation dropped primarily because of flat demand which is evidence of a decoupling between economic growth and power generation.

Data from the EIA reveals that during this time US power generation remained flat, but the makeup of U.S. power generation changed significantly. Generation from natural gas now exceeds that from coal and generation from wind, solar and other renewable sources now exceeds hydroelectric generation.

With respect to emissions the change is even more impressive. In a business as usual scenario assuming that demand continued to increase as it had prior to 2005, energy intensity (the energy required to produce a dollar of GDP) had remained at its 2005 value, and the energy mix had remained at its 2005 value, the expected emissions from electric power generation would have been about 3,043 MMmt (million metric tonnes). In 2017 actual emissions were much less, about 1,744 MMmt. About half of the drop in emissions in 2017 compared to the projected business as usual emissions was due to less demand (654 MMmt). Since the economy expanded over this time this is attributable to a drop in energy intensity and is evidence of decoupling of economic growth from power generation. The other important factors were switching among fuels, primarily switching from coal to natural gas (329 MMmt) and replacing fossil fuels with non-hydro renewables (316 MMmt).

In 2017 actual emissions from power generation were 43% less than that projected in the business as usual scenario and 28% below 2005 emissions. This is important progress toward the Paris accord targets (which the U.S. has dropped out of) since emissions from electricity generation are about 28% of U.S. total emissions.

November 01, 2018

A spatial analysis of possible environmental factors contributing to the increase in the number of underweight babies born in Canada was presented by Charlene Nielsen at GeoAlberta 2018. Termed low birth weight at term (LBWT), this is the second most important cause of infant mortality in Canada and costs the medical systems hundreds of millions of dollars every year. It is also linked to childhood and adult diseases. Charlene's hypothesis was that environmental factors including chemical pollution, the man made environment, and socioeconomic level were contributing factors to low birth weight babies in Canada. She used spatial analytics to study the problem which she used as the basis for her PhD thesis at the University of Alberta.

One of the publicly available data sources for chemical emissions that she used is the National Pollutant Release Inventory which has been maintained by Environment and Climate Change Canada since 1993. It currently monitors the emissions of 324 chemical substances.

Her study found that air-released or land-based pollutants may be more important depending on geographical location. There was a greater correlation of low birth weight babies with the environmental factors she studied in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia. While this study found that environmental factors did contribute to low birth weight babies, these are not the only factors. This study was particularly interesting because it used the geographical distribution of low weight births and the spatial distribution of environmental factors to try to determine some of the factors contributing to low weight births. Secondly it used publicly available environmental data which demonstrates that this type of spatial analysis can be easily applied in other studies.

October 06, 2018

Four countries have launched satellites which can measure concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions. Canada's GHGSat Inc is the first private company that can measure emissions from any location on earth. To date GHGSat's Clair satellite has measured emissions from 2,500 locations. Among these are emissions from so-called superemitters in the natural gas industry in the U.S.

I have blogged extensively about methane emissions from the shale gas industry. There is increasing evidence that leakages from production wells, of which there are about half a million in the U.S., erodes the advantage that natural gas has over coal with respect to contributing to greenhouse gas warming. Studies suggest that a small number of wells, socalled superemitters, are responsible for more than half of the total volume of leaked methane gas in the United States. This is an image of a heat map created from measurements made by GHGSat's Claire August 2018 over a site in Texas. The heat map has been superimposed on imagery captured by ESA's Sentinel-1.

February 09, 2018

New buildings in Vancouver will be zero-emissions or zero-emissions ready by 2030 or earlier. Vancouver will achieve this by a combination of energy usage reporting, incentives to the private sector, regulation including rezoning and building code changes,and increasing public awareness about low carbon building construction and operation.

At a Canadian BIM Council (CanBIM) conference in Vancouver, Brad Badelt, Assistant Director of Sustainability at the City of Vancouver, outlined how Vancouver intends to meet the goals defined in its 2015 renewable city strategy; 100% renewable energy by 2050 and a reduction of 80% in emissions compared to 2007.

Vancouver is already 31% renewable because the electric power used by buildings is almost entirely renewable. Currently building heating relies almost entirely on natural gas. Vancouver has had electric buses for years and municipal rail (Skytrain) is electric. 57% of CO2 emissions come from heating buildings. Currently almost half of new building floorspace in Vancouver is single family residential.

In 2050 Vancouver's building stock is projected be 30‎% built prior to 2010, 30% current or upcoming, and 40% zero emissions buildings. The more that can be done right now to move toward zero-energy-ready buildings, the less retrofitting will be required to achieve Vancouver's emissions goals.

Vancouver's strategy for achieving all new buildings being zero-emissions-ready by 2030 is multi-faceted. It includes regulation: to gradually restrict greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, reduce heat loss, and limiting total energy use; city leadership: all new city-owned buildings will be zero emissions; incentives: incentivizing the private sector to move toward zero-emissions building; and capacity building: investing in tools to develop and share knowledge and to remove barriers. One of the things that Vancouver is doing right now is creating a Zero Emissions Building Centre of Excellence, scheduled to open in May, which is the first in Canada. BIM and energy performance modeling will have a key role in the drive toward reduced buildings emissions.

In Vancouver's zero emissions strategy the next frontier is embodied carbon - emissions sourced to the materials and energy used in the construction of buildings. Vancouver plans to first require embodied emissions reporting followed eventually by regulation. One thing that is definitely in the works is encouraging the use of a lot more wood in construction. This is partly due to the intention to reduce embodied carbon and partly due to using the excess capacity resulting from U.S. duties on softwood imports.

July 12, 2017

The world's global coal-fired power generation plants provides around 40% of the world’s electricity. This fleet is the youngest it has been for decades, with more than 500 GW added since 2010, mostly in emerging economies. To simply shut these new and in many cases highly efficient plants down to meet climate goals would be a political, social and economic challenge. According to the IEA retrofitting these plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will need to be a key strategy in many regions.

There are now 17 large-scale CCS projects operating around the world, with at least one more due to be commissioned this year. China has just announced construction of its first large-scale CCS project in the coal-chemicals sector and with seven further projects under early development. The Petra Nova project in Texas was delivered on time and on budget earlier this year. Petra Nova is the second, and much larger, project to retrofit post-combustion CCS technology to an existing coal-fired power station, with costs reportedly around 20% lower than the world-first effort at Boundary Dam in Canada. On the other hand work on the most ambitious carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant in the world at the Kemper County Energy Facility in MIssissippi has been suspended. It turned out that the rapid scale up of a new integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology from pilot to a 585 MW plant proved to be far more complex and challenging than anticipated.

March 28, 2017

Emissions Associated with Electric Power Production

Methane represents 9.9 % of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and is at least 20 more times more potent in warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

It has been asserted that natural gas power plants, which are responsible for 21% of power generation in the US, produce 50% less emissions than coal-fired plants. However, in the past the amount of methane gas that is lost (vented or leaked) during production, distribution and in plants has not been included in the calculation. Now a new study suggests that methane emissions from power plants and refineries may be much larger than current estimates.

A recent EPA analysis doubled its previous estimates for the amount of methane gas that leaks from pipes and is vented from gas wells, which significantly changes the emissions picture. Methane (CH4) levels from hydraulic fracturing of shale gas were found to be 9,000 times higher than previously reported. Based on the new numbers, the median gas-powered plant in the United States is estimated to be 40 % cleaner than coal-fired plants, according to calculations ProPublica has made. In addition about half of the 1,600 gas-fired power plants in the US operate relatively inefficiently. In the past these plants were estimated to be 32 % cleaner than coal, but with the revised EPA estimates, these ~800 inefficient plants are estimated to produce 25 percent less emissions than coal.

But there is another issue. Methane is one of the more potent greenhouse gases for global warming, but it is not clear just how much more potent methane is than CO2. The EPA has estimated a factor of 21 times compared to carbon dioxide. But Robert Howarth, an environmental biology professor at Cornell University, has suggested that it is actually 72 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in terms of its warming potential. This is critical, because if the climate effect of methane from natural gas is 72 rather than 21 times that of carbon dioxide from burning coal, natural gas may even turn out to be worse than coal in terms of global warming. Howarth has suggested that the type of shale gas drilling taking place in Texas, New York and Pennsylvania generates particularly high emissions of methane and could be as dirty as coal.

New estimates of methane emissions from power plants

Now a new study reports on overflights of power plants and refineries and finds that methane emissions are much larger than current estimates. Power plants and oil refineries are large consumers of natural gas. The EPA has collected data contributed by operators and estimated the methane (CH4) emissions from these plants, but there is high uncertainty in these estimated. In this study an airborne chemistry lab was used to estimate the methane emissions from three gas-fired power plants and three oil refineries. The average methane emission rates were larger than than the operator-reported estimates by 21 to 120 times for the power plants and by 11 to 90 times for the refineries. By looking at the pattern of methane emissions compared to carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour, the researchers were able to determine that the methane emissions were primarily from non-combustion processes suggesting leaks and venting as the sources. Scaling these result to the national level suggests that methane emissions from these types of facilities are 4.4 to 42 times larger than current estimates. The results indicate that gas-fired power plants and oil refineries could contribute significantly to U.S. methane emissions. The estimated contribution of 0.61 teragrams of methane annually (Tg CH4/yr) is significant, representing about 2% of total U.S. annual emissions of methane of about 30 Tg CH4/yr.

A recently published study has assessed the spatial distribution of anthropogenic methane sources in the United States by combining comprehensive atmospheric methane observations, extensive spatial datasets, and a high-resolution atmospheric transport model. Based on the results of this analysis the authors conclude that the EPA underestimates methane emissions nationally by a factor of about 1.5. Generally the study found that methane emissions due to the animal husbandry and fossil fuel industries have larger greenhouse gas impacts than indicated by existing inventories.

One of the motivations from switching from coal to natural gas for these types of facilities is that natural gas delivers the same amount of energy but with significantly reduced emissions. But that does not take into account leaks and other processes releasing methane during production, distribution and within plants. These latest results further reduce the advantage of gas-fired over coal-fired power production.

A study by Robert W. Howarth, Renee Santoro, and Anthony Ingraffea has concluded that the emissions of methane from shale gas wells are between 30% and 100% more than methane emissions from conventional natural gas wells. The study estimates that between 3.6% to 7.9% of the methane from shale-gas production escapes to the atmosphere in venting and leaks over the lifetime of a well.

As a result the study found that the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint for shale gas is greater than that for conventional gas or oil. When compared to coal, which is responsible for nearly 50% of electric power generation in the US, the GHG footprint of shale gas is estimated to be 20% to 100% greater than coal over a 20 year period. Over a 100 years, the study concludes that the GHG impact of shale gas is comparable to coal.

March 21, 2017

According to the IEA, even thought the world's economy grew in 2016, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions remained constant. This is the third year in a row of "decoupled emissions", economic growth that did not generate more emissions. The IEA ascribes the flattening of emissions to growing renewable power generation, switches from coal to natural gas, improvements in energy efficiency, and economic factors. The IEA estimated that energy-related emissions in 2016 amounted to 32.1 gigatonnes, the same as the previous two years. In 2016 the global economy grew 3.1%. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in the United States and China and were stable in Europe, offsetting increases in most of the rest of the world. According to the IEA in the United States, carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 3% while the economy grew by 1.6%.

January 31, 2017

New York's influential Reforming the Vision (REV) is not only redefining the regulatory model for the State of New York but has become a model for other states. At this year's Distributech Audrey Zibelman, who was confirmed as chair of the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) on September 3, 2013 and since then has presided over the development of NY REV presented her view of the tranformation the electric power industry is experiencing. In her view it all starts with the customer who wants more choice, greater reliability and lower rates. She is convinced that the technology is already there that will enable utilities to achieve deep decarbonization with improved reliability and efficiency. The key to all of this is changing the business model for the power network operators. Distribution companies need to become platform companies (DSPs) that can provide the infrastructure for increasingly dynamic generation as well as demand. The model has to provide compensation to DSPs who make the network more efficient. The business model has to encourage innovation that enables transactive energy with technologies such as blockchain and the internet of things. It has to encourage and attract younger people to the utility industry and encourage third party startups. In her view being CEO of an electric utility is the best job in the world right now. Unlike the telecom revolution which led to the digital divide, the electric power transformation has to avoid an energy divide and ensure that lower income folks are included and also experience the benefits of the new power grid. Very interestingly she said she used to believe this was all going to happen in five to ten years, but with the accelerating momentum in technology and regulation she now believes the transformation of the utility is happening faster than that. Quite a vision but the NY REV provides a regulatory model that is designed to enable this to happen. New York's utilities are moving rapidly in this direction.

At Distributech 2017 in San Diego, the opening keynotes used the word "transformation" to refer to what the electric power industry is going through. Teresa Hansen likened the impact of this transformation to the War of Currents about 100 years ago when George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla's AC won out over Thomas Edison's DC. At the Smart Gird Interoperability Panel 2016 Grid Modernization Summit in Washington DC Anne Pramaggiore, President and CEO of ComEd of Chicago, was the first to call the current business transformation that the electric power industry is experiencing a "revolution". And many other speakers at the SGIP conference agreed with this characterization.

Another key theme at this year's Distributech is greater uncertainty. Philip Mezey, President and CEO of Itron, mentioned regulatory and federal uncertainty specifically referring to the challenge of keeping regulation current with rapidly changing technology and utility business models. But he sees many opportunities in addition to the challenges. He mentioned managing deep solar penetration, ensuring cybersecurity, gowing numbers of EV vehicles, transactive energy, the digital grid enabling utilties to optimize power delivery, improved integration with customers, and moving beyond the smart grid by connecting more smart devices all of which are capable of collecting data. He also believes that this new grid, referred to by some as Grid 3.0, is going to require distributed intelligence because decisions have to be made locally and quickly.

Scott Drury, President of San Diego Gas and Electricity, who aspires for SDG&E to be the best energy utility in the U.S., outlined some of the innovative things that SDG&E is doing to ensure clean, safe and reliable energy for its customers. It outperforms California's Renewable Energy Portfolio in reducing emissions. It has over 100,000 rooftop installations in its service territory and boasts that it is able to make the fastest solar interconnections in the U.S. It is aggressively installing charging stations in its service territory including a target of ensuring 10% of these chargers are in disadvantaged communities. SDG&E has implemented its own weather network with many realtime reporting stations to help reduce the risk of wildfires. It has undergrounded 60% of its network. It has implemented a microgrid in a remote desert community and it is building one of the biggest lithium ion battery projects in the U.S., a substation in Escondido with energy storage capable of delivering 30 megawatts for four hours.